Page:Once a Week Jul - Dec 1859.pdf/341

No. 17.

While through columned woodland palace reigns a dusk of silent sadness,

And the low winds chase the tear-drops from the hazel’s misty fold?

Or if the witching night may weave, of moonlight and of shadow,

Spells to bind you where the fairies trace their circlets green and cool;

Though the dawn and noon and evening there are clad in matchless beauty,

Choose the night to hear a legend on the brink of Bradmere Fool.

By the rushing flood of Teign, amidst the Druid oaks of Gidleigh,

Once a maiden and her lover wander’d sadly side by side;

And though he came of gentle blood, he sought a peasant’s daughter,

With the truth of noble natures, for his loved and honour’d bride.

“It may not be, beloved!” — and her fair cheek glow’d with blushes —

“For I would not so disgrace you and your lineage pure and high:

How should I, a peasant maiden, bear the mighty name of Cary,

Or with shy and rustic manners meet your lady- mother’s eye?”

“’Tie the dear and noble heart that clothes the out- ward state with honour,”

Frankly spoke the earnest suitor, all unknowing what he said:

“As the moon invests with beauty every cloud that hangs around her,

So the soul bestows its radiance on what else were cold and dead.”

Grieving sorely thus to pain him, yet unbroken in her firmness,

Grieving sorely thus to lose him, yet she would not do him wrong, —

Would not shame him with his kinsmen, or embroil him with his mother:

So, with slow sad steps, she parted, and with weep- ing low and long.

But he, kneeling down before her, with his eyes up- raised to Heaven

(And the river hush’d its murmur with the breezes and the bough):

“If you will not be a lady, Amy, I will be a peasant,

And the God who made you great I call to witness to my vow.

“What! shall social fictions part us? We have souls form’d for each other!

I will doff my courtly garments, I will labour in the mine;

Lands and lordships, name and honours, I will yield them to my brother,

And the wages of my labour, noble woman, shall be thine.”

Even now but half-assenting: time might change him: could she trust him?

Would not thoughts too oft regretful turn to Stantor’s hall of pride?

Yet she vow’d that if his love lived till the Tors bloom’d rich in purple,

To the next year’s golden harvest, she would be the miner’s bride.

’Twas a glorious mom of suminei, and the miner’s wife rose early,

And prepared her husband s meal, and took her baby on her breast;

And a little bright-hair’d boy was bounding lightly on before her,

As she walk’d to cheer her William in his morning hour of rest.

All the dewy flowers were opening, and the air was fill’d with music,

And a joy lay on the landscape such as brighter noon denies;

Very glorious shone the morning on the Tors all golden- crested,

Rising grandly from earth’s shadows to be crown’d amidst the skies.

They are threading greenest alleys, they have pass’d the marshy hollow,

Bright with crimson tufts of sunden and Saint John's worts’ ruddy gold;

Pass’d the mighty Druid cromlech that the three grey British Sisters

Raised by hellish arts of sorcery in the mythic days of old.

The green elms gently waving, and the oaks of brighter foliage,

And the willows and the beeches and the poplar’s silver shine:

The miner’s wife, fair Amy, saw them bending towards the valley

Where her true and loving husband wrought all night within the mine.

Then the bright-hair’d boy bounds forward in the green and shady alley,

And the wife’s heart bounds before him as he shouts his father’s name:

Why so wan and wild, yet tearless, speeds the little child returning,

While a strange pale light is gleaming through the archway whence he came?

Amy pauses not to question, but she threads the ver- dant archway.

Does the Art accursed linger in the flowery vale of Teign?

Or have pixies borne her sleeping to their realms of magic beauty,

Far beyond the bowers of dreamland, to behold that wondrous scene?

For the green elms scarcely waving, and the oaks of brighter foliage,

And the willows and the beeches and the poplar's silver shine, —

They are bending o’er a bright lake, and its pure translucent waters

Fill the forest-girdled valley that contain’d the ancient mine.

From the deep mine’s deepest caverns, like a gleaming serpent rising,

Wound the icy spring through corridor and chamber far below,

Victor ever in the darkness o’er the life that throbb’d within them,

Till it spread its lucent mirror to the morning’s purple glow.